Seasonal products are widely available everywhere but it’s tricky to rank seasonal product pages because of the competitive market and half of the time the product is not in demand or supply.

In recent office hours on 18th March, Google’s John Mueller responded to a concern regarding the difficulty of ranking seasonal products, speculating that structured data could be the reason. John provided practical advice on how to get seasonal product pages indexed and ranked.

The person who asked the question was referring to how their e-commerce client sells seasonal products, such as bakery items for different holidays.

They explained how Google’s structured data standards resulted in a yellow warning in Google’s structured data test, alerting users to missed suggested structured data fields.

This, according to the guy in charge of SEO, was causing the seasonal product pages to not rank.

John Mueller of Google explains how to rank seasonal content.

The problem was summarized as:

“In other words, the page can be crawled but not submitted, indexed or ranked.”

John Mueller initially confirmed that the seasonal product page’s ranking would not be affected by incomplete structured data.

He indicated that even if the HTML was flawed, it would not be a factor in determining whether or not the page should be indexed.

Mueller stated:

“The page can definitely be indexed, even if some of the structured data markups is wrong.

The page can be indexed even if the HTML itself is completely broken.”

Here is how you can rank seasonal products on google

“The other part I think is something that is useful to look at specifically for eCommerce sites, in that it’s very helpful for us to understand what you would consider being important across a website.

That means when we look at a website, if you show us as visibly as possible what you think is critical here, then it’s easier for us to pick that up.

From a practical point of view, that means when we look at something like the home page of a website or whatever the most important page is from the website, like… let us know about what you consider to be important and link to that prominently.

So for something like a Saint Patrick’s day cake, that’s something where when we look at their home page, we should be able to see that this is actually a seasonal thing and this is really important for you and that we find direct links from the home page to that specific product.”

Mueller went on to state that when he looked at the exact website in question, he noticed that the seasonal page was not prominently linked from the home page or even the next level down.

“That means for us, when we look at this website overall, even if we see this specific product being mentioned in a sitemap file, it looks like some random product that just happened to show up on the eCommerce site.

We don’t realize that actually, this is something that is really important to you and that you would like to have treated prominently in the search results.

So what I would do in cases like this, where you have especially some time-limited event happening, is make sure that you’re really visibly linking to that from the home page.

That you include some of the …in the home page as well so that even if we only re-index and reprocess your home page we already know that there’s some information there that we can pick up on.

So if you have a Saint Patrick’s day cake for example, and you mention it on your home page, and we only update your home page for whatever reason, then if someone searches for Saint Patrick’s Day cake then we will at least know your home page could be relevant for that query.

And ideally, if it’s linked directly from their home page, then we can pick up that product as well and see, well, this is a really important product for this website.

And probably we can process it a little bit faster than we could some random other product that you happen to update on a website.

So essentially with internal linking, you can give us a lot of information about what you care about across a website.

And for a large page, our algorithms will try to follow that.

It’s not that they’ll make a judgment call on their own. It’s more that they look at your site and they realize oh, this person says this is really important.

So we will give it a little bit more weight.

And what you consider important is totally up to you. It might be something seasonal. It might be something that you sell really well. …All of that is totally up to you.

But make it as clear as possible when we look at your website, especially your home page, especially the more important pages on the site, what you want to be treated in the foreground when it comes to search.”

Conclusion

The main message here is that you should be aware of how your site communicates essential information to Google.

As a result, certain pages are less important than others. It’s impossible for all pages to be equally important. Some sites, especially seasonal stuff, need to be highlighted so that Google understands how significant they are.